Since buying Twitter last year, Elon Musk has made a series of chaotic changes to the social media service that have alienated legions of users.
That’s been good news for Bluesky, an invite-only rival that has quickly gained a following since debuting in February. So far, its app has been downloaded 360,000 times from Apple’s app store worldwide, consumer data group Data.ai told Fortune, and over a million more users are on the waitlist to join. Most of the new users have been added this month, according to Bloomberg.
Bluesky was created by Jack Dorsey, who happens to also be Twitter’s co-founder. In contrast to Twitter, he wanted to build a decentralized service, meaning its user data is stored in independent servers rather than in ones owned by one company—thereby giving users more autonomy in how they interact on the platform.
“We envision an open social media ecosystem where developers have more opportunity to build and innovate, and users have more choice and control over which services they use and their experience on social media as a whole,” Jay Graber, CEO of Bluesky, wrote in a blog post last year.
Dorsey has said that one of his regrets was commercializing Twitter. If he had a chance to do it over again, he’d make it more like an open source project.
“The biggest issue and my biggest regret is that it [Twitter] became a company,” Dorsey tweeted in August, responding to a question about whether the platform turned out like he wanted it to.
The biggest issue and my biggest regret is that it became a company.
— jack (@jack) August 25, 2022
